OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights

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Revision as of 03:59, November 22, 2005 by FrJohn (talk | contribs) (External Links)
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Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License as used by Wikipedia and/or the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, Version 2.5 or any later version published; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. Subject to disclaimers.


All material on OrthodoxWiki is by default released under the Creative Commons license listed above. For other licenses (especially for images), see Help:Image licenses.

Revised Default Copyright

As of November 22, 2005, we are tweaking our licensing structure a little bit. Previously, the default copyright for all OrthodoxWiki materials was a Creative Commons (CC) License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0).

There are a couple of problems with this arrangement, not least that it in incompatible with (and thus violates the terms of) the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) used by Wikipedia. This causes complications because a number of our articles began as Wikipedia imports.

Because of other concerns, we don’t want to simply adopt the GFDL.

So, we are planning to move to a dual license. Every edit that is made will be by default licensed under both the GFDL as well as a revised Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5). Naturally, this will not apply to material that was previously released under a different license (unless we have explicit permission otherwise), such as the content taken from Wikipedia or edits made before November 22, 2005. This will also not apply to any material that is submitted to OrthodoxWiki under other copyright terms, such as most of our images and some of our articles. If you would like to apply this license retroactively to include all of your edits, please add the acceptrevised template to your user page. (You can do this simply by adding {{acceptedrevised}}) to your page.)

The main change as far as the Creative Commons license is concerned, is that the new license allows restricted commercial use of the material. The GFDL already allows this, and we see no reason to make the CC license more restrictive. Furthermore, we do not anticipate anybody making big money off of OrthodoxWiki content. If someone can earn something by publishing it commercially according to the terms of one of these licenses, we will simply be happy that the content is being used and that OrthodoxWiki is being publicized.

We would also like to make sure that the barriers to reprinting material here are not too high. Right now, to be safe, reprinting material requires contacting all of the individual contributors and obtaining their permission to use their materials and crediting them individually.

To this end, the “click-through language’’ (what is agreed to everytime a user clicks “Save Page